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Eugene O’Neill, Local Drunk

I have passed the Golden Swan Garden, located on West 4th street and 6th avenue, right by the subway train, a number of times, but I never knew it was a speakeasy until I began researching Prohibition in Greenwich Village. The park was the once location of a bar called the “Golden Swan Cafe,” referred to by renowned playwright Eugene O’Neill and his friends as the “Hell Hole.” The saloon was torn down in 1928, but not before it left its imprint on the area. O’Neill would spend many nights at this local haunt drinking himself into a stupor. His friends from the Provincetown Playhouse said that if he wasn’t at his apartment, then he was at the Hell Hole. O’Neill had a serious drinking problem, and at one point he even drank himself into a coma. The playwright eventually realized he had a problem and quit drinking. His time at the Hell Hole left a major impact on his literature though. The Golden Swan was the main basis for his setting in his play The Iceman Cometh. Many of the people he stumbled across at the Hell Hole became characters in his play. We can credit this speakeasy for influencing one of our greatest playwrights.